The Kit

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1:05This episode contains discussion of sexual violence. Please use discretion.

1:13In 1972, a woman named Martha Goddard, she went by Marty, was working for a non-profit foundation in Chicago. She was 31. One day, she was asked if she would join the board of an organization that ran a crisis hotline for young, unhoused people. And I joined their board of directors. I was asked to do that. This is an oral history recording of Marty Goddard from 2003. Part of being a board member was we had to do phone, answer the phones and be trained on that so we'd understand what our staffs went through. She started answering calls on the crisis hotline. In the early 70s, people often called kids and teenagers living on the streets runaways.

1:59But as Marty talked to more and more of them on the phone and got to hear their stories, she realized that there was more going on than most people assumed. That gave me a great foundation for finding out why were these kids leaving? What was the problem? And it was not just runaways, kids who just weren't wanted by their families or guardians, But so many of them had to leave home because they were sexually abused. And I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem. They did not run away to be hippies and, you know, kind of join the circus. They were fleeing unsafe homes. Journalist Pagan Kennedy has researched Marty Goddard's life and work.

2:45The general attitude of police departments was that if somebody was sexually assaulted, there was no point in investigating. You could never prove it because the victims were liars. It was just completely the norm to think that way. And the way that we would now see anybody under 18 as being a victim of child abuse if they were sexually exploited, that line didn't exist. If those kids were assaulted or they were fleeing from an abuser, they would be blamed. Pagan Kennedy writes that in the early 1970s, people believed that child sexual abuse was very rare. A psychiatric textbook said that incest only happened in one in every one million families, and that when it happened, the children had often, quote, initiated it.

3:43So there was really this attitude that these girls who were ending up on the street, they were a criminal element, and they would often be taken off the street by cops, And then if they ended up in the juvenile detention center, they could be assaulted again. And Marty was just so upset with how the police were coping with this, where these girls were sort of treated as criminals, and this complete unspoken world of child abuse that was going on. Marty Goddard wanted to do something. She started introducing herself to what were then called anti-rape activists in Chicago. She met a woman named Cynthia Geary, who at the time worked for the ACLU.

4:36Marty was a person who got outraged when she encountered injustice. Cynthia Geary. And so she kind of recruited me, I would say. Both Marty and Cynthia often traveled for work. Every city we went to, we would walk in cold to the local police department. And we would say, we'd like to know, we'd like to talk to someone who could tell us what's happening in your city and state regarding victims of rape. How are they handled? And back in those days, the doors were open. So we amassed information, then we'd take it all down and we'd start writing things. well, it looks like it's because of this or this or this or this, and here's what Iowa's doing, and here's what New York's doing, and here's so forth.

5:25They compared their findings from other states with what was going on in Chicago. It wasn't just the young people that Marty had been talking to. The problem was much broader, and women all over the city were reporting that they were afraid. One activist wrote that sexual assault in Chicago was, quote, epidemic, and that it was, quote, not a city you wanted to venture out into after dark. There was suddenly this kind of awakening around 1974 where a lot of female activists were calling for something to be done about the huge amount of sexual assault in the city at that time. So Marnie Goddard got involved with that.

6:13In 1973, only about a tenth of sexual assault cases in Chicago were reported, and only about a tenth of those cases went to trial. Few perpetrators ever ended up in prison. One 1973 police training manual from Chicago read, quote, Many rape complaints are not legitimate. it, it is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover. Police officers would routinely ask survivors of an assault what they'd been wearing and whether they might have provoked an attack. One day, a group of about 70 women marched into the office of the state's attorney, a man named Bernard Carey, to protest the state's failure to prosecute rapists.

7:05They posted messages on the walls of his office. One of them read, Wanted Bernard Carey for aiding and abetting rapists. And then, Marty Goddard decided to try to talk to the state's attorney herself. I went cold into the state's attorney's office, and I asked to see him. And don't ask to this day how I got in, but I did. And he said, look, we've got a problem. I don't know what the answer is, but how would you like to kind of work with us to work it out? I said, great, but we need the cops in on this. So Marty Goddard met with a police sergeant and then with the president of the hospital council so she could assemble a group to investigate.

7:47I said, give me your best people, two of your best people, the two best police officers, the two best prosecutors, and the two best hospital people. And make it nurses, thank you. So they did, and we tore the issue apart. The problem was we weren't able to apprehend very many people, and when you did get somebody in custody, you couldn't prove your case. Marty Goddard went to the crime lab of the Chicago Police Department and asked to talk to every single employee, at every level, about rape cases. She wanted to know what evidence they collected. and said, what is it that you people need? Well, nobody had ever come in there and asked them before.

8:34We got ever. In one day, we were so overloaded with information, we didn't have a tape recorder, so we had to scramble and take notes. And basically, here's what they told us. They said, we don't get evidence. And this really kicked everything off. Marty Goddard was told that many of the cases were so-called he-said-she-said situations. the account of a victim wasn't enough. In the old days, it was the victim's fault, okay? Or it was consensual. Or, okay, she may have been raped, but it wasn't me. And then I thought, well, if what I'm hearing is correct, you all don't have any evidence, so how can we prosecute successfully?

9:17Even if you arrest somebody, so then what do you do to solve that problem? Marty Goddard had an idea. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

9:33Marty Goddard spent more time with the employees at the Chicago Crime Lab. And she also tried to find out what happened when someone who had experienced a sexual assault got to a hospital. What she learned from all these different interviews and conversations she had was that when, And I'm saying a woman because at the time there was very little awareness of sexual assault that happens to men. So if a woman was assaulted, generally she would go into the hospital or the police would take her to the hospital. And then she's taken in for an examination. the staff is very focused on just treating her and not on collecting evidence.

10:23So they would take off all her clothes. They might cut open her clothes. And so if there were stab marks or whatever, they wouldn't capture any of that. They would sort of make an attempt to take some swabs, but nobody had taught them how to take swabs in a way that would work for the crime lab. So they might stick slides together in a way that everything would get sort of mushed together and the evidence would be no good. So the evidence that they collected, nobody had told them how to do it the right way. And so it usually would not be in a state that was very usable for the crime lab. Even if the evidence was collected at the hospital, Pagan Kennedy says police could still elect not to look at it if an officer didn't believe a victim.

11:15Ultimately, the decision belongs to the police officer or detective. And if this woman seems like she's, they called it crying rape, if she's just, you know, trying to get back at her boyfriend or she's a prostitute or she's whatever, for any reason, you don't really have to collect the evidence. And that was very much the attitude. When a survivor of a sexual assault was taken to the hospital, there were very few systems in place. If your clothes were collected as evidence, the hospital may not have any others for you. Here's Marty Goddard. If you don't have replacement clothes and you're going to take the patient's underwear and jewelry and shoes and nylons and slip and their dress and their coat in the winter in Chicago and put them in bags, turn them over to the crime lab.

12:12Well, excuse me, but what is she supposed to go home in? And I'm telling you for sure, not only did I see this, but I've heard too many horror stories around the country. Victims were sent home in those little paper slippers, and they were sent home with a paper or cloth, hopefully cloth gown, one in the front facing front and the other tying around the back. That's what they got sent home in. And they were put in marked cars, like the Chicago PD or the Sheriff's Department or whatever, and driven home. Now, gee, don't you think your neighbors are going to wonder why you're in a police car and why you're dressed in paper slippers and two surgical gowns?

12:56Well, of course. And not everybody wanted to tell their mom or their husband or their roommate that they had just been raped. So a lot of people wouldn't call. She had a very good idea of what was going wrong, of the way evidence was being thrown out or never collected at all, the bias that the police departments had against the victims, of the abuse of victims, and of just the pure incompetence. Pagan Kennedy. She was aware of the whole range of problems that were preventing sexual assault evidence from being collected in a scientific manner. Marty Goddard wanted to change the way that evidence was collected in hospitals and make it clear to police officers, hospital workers, and crime lab technicians what they each needed to do.

13:51She got to work creating what she called an evidence collection kit. She had a very clear idea of what would be in it, And it would be, you know, swabs. It would be evidence envelopes. This is pre-DNA, so it's pretty simple. It's not high-tech by any means. The Rape Evidence Collection Kit would include things like nail clippers, slides, and a comb for collecting hair. But I think the most important idea that the kit had in it was that it would have a place where the people in the hospital who did the forensic exam, they would sign off on it. The kit would include a sign-off sheet and even a pencil.

14:42And then it would go to the crime lab and whoever opened the kit would sign off. And so the kit would, at every stage, there'd be somebody taking responsibility for it. We'll be right back.

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17:30Marty Goddard was born in 1941 and grew up in a suburb near Detroit. When she was young, she became passionate about racial equality and women's rights. Marty clashed with her father as a teenager and tried to run away from home. Pagan Kennedy says she thinks that's what made Marty so concerned with family violence. Marty lived in New York City for a while, working as a secretary, before she moved to Chicago and started her nonprofit job. She was a great storyteller, and she could bring the issues that she was interested in to life. Marty did not have a college degree. She was surrounded, I mean, in the foundation world.

18:17Everybody's got doctorates and everything else. That's why she needed a whole new approach. Her approach was person to person. and Marty was kind of a paradox in that she was so effective socially but was terrified of any kind of public speaking. And that's why she recruited me. She needed a person to go up to the microphone. That wasn't her calling. Her calling was to go and meet people that were experiencing something, getting to know them, and then sharing their stories one-on-one. Marty Goddard had been told that if she wanted her evidence collection kit to become a reality, she'd need the support of a man named Louis Vitullo, the head of Chicago Police Department's microscope unit.

19:13My memory of it is that she went in unannounced. So she walks in with her plan for a rape kit. Now, Lou Vitullo is kind of a gruff person. He does not think about what he's saying before he does it often.

19:40Basically, he kicked her out. Marty called me after this happened. I didn't even know she was going to go try to do this. I probably would have tried to dissuade her from trying. but she called me and told me about it. I'm trying to convey some of her raw humor. Because she was funny, wasn't she? Yeah, very funny. And it was kind of like, oh, she said, well, that didn't go so well.

20:15But one day, Louis Fetulo suddenly called Marty Goddard and said he had something to show her. So she went to his office. It turned out Vitula had studied her plans and had created a prototype of Marty Goddard's rape kit. But the city wasn't going to pay to produce these kits. So Marty Goddard cut back her hours at her day job and started a non-profit to try to make them herself. She needed money, but she says prospective funders didn't want to go near it. All they did was want to fund the, no offense to the groups, the YWCA and the Girl Scouts. And that's it. That was their end of their obligation for women's and girls' programs.

21:01Most of the foundation and corporate people were male. And they held the big money. So they held the purse strings. And it wasn't loosening up. They didn't get it. They didn't understand, and I understand because that was my dad's generation. So they didn't under, you didn't say the word rape. Okay? Not in public and not in private. You didn't talk about that stuff. So the money wasn't going there. Nobody would give me the components, the combs and the slides and the swabs and the folders and the paper bags and the printing materials and the box and the evidence tape. They wouldn't give it to me.

21:37And I didn't have any money. Not enough to fund that up front. She didn't know what to do. So she talked to a friend named Margaret Standish, who worked for the Playboy Foundation. In 1965, Hugh Hefner created the foundation to support causes that he personally believed in. And I said, Margaret, I'm in trouble here and I can't get this product manufactured. Nobody will send me anything. And they gave me$10 ,000. And I took a lot of flack from the women's movement, but too bad. I got to tell you what, I said if it was Penthouse or Hustler, no. But Playboy, please give me a break. There was an enormous building in the middle of Chicago with this neon sign on it that said Playboy.

22:24Playboy was making money hand over fist. It had its clubs with the bunnies and it had magazines. It was this huge empire. Hugh Hefner was very committed to giving money to civil liberty causes, especially free speech causes. But Hefner really saw sexual assault as an issue related to sexual freedom, because if women were afraid of being assaulted, of course, they couldn't be sexually liberated, and that meant men couldn't be as sexually liberated. So he was actually very interested in helping victims of assault and getting this to be a conversation. Marty Goddard now had the components to put together 10 ,000 rape kits that she would distribute across Chicago as part of a pilot program.

23:19But she was short on staff that could assemble the boxes. Her friend at the Playboy Foundation, Margaret, had an idea. She said, I've got this great idea, Marty. You're not going to believe this. I said, what is it? She said, well, everybody just loves the Playboy bunny. And we have all these older women, senior citizens, and they want to do something. So we're going to provide the sandwiches and the coffee and the juice. And we're going to invite them up to the Playboy offices. And we're going to give you a huge room with all these assembly tables, folding tables. We're going to have the components shipped to Playboy.

23:57And we're going to set everything out. And you come in and decide how you want it done. train them, and they'll do it. And that's what they did. Well, they were so excited. There were so many people up there. And the word got around, guess where we got to go today? And they give us the stuff to eat and everything. And, well, everybody wanted to come downtown Chicago then after they heard that. They called the kits the Vitullo kit, after Sergeant Louis Vitullo from Chicago's police department. The rape kit was branded in Vitullo's name for a long time. You know how Marty felt about that? I think she thought it was a very smart thing to do.

24:36I think she may have even done it. She knew that his support was critical. And it wasn't just because he was a man. It was because he directed the forensics department. So having his name on it made it recognizable as something to take seriously in the city of Chicago. An article in the Chicago Police Star, headlined, Vitulo's Rape Evidence Kit is an Aid to Victims, featured a photo of Vitulo holding the kit. On September 14, 1978, Marty Coddard's rape kit became available in hospital emergency rooms for the first time. One newspaper article called the pilot program she had designed in Chicago, quote, the first of its type in the nation.

25:29The kit included a checklist for medical examiners and detailed instructions on how to seal and secure the evidence they'd collected. The medical examiner was instructed to hand the patient a card included in the box, which had information about where to find counseling. By the end of 1978, staff from 72 hospitals had participated in a training seminar created by Marty Goddard's nonprofit. The seminar included presentations on forensic science and victim trauma. There was a lot that wasn't in that cardboard box. The idea that the hospital staff had to be trained, the police department had to be trained, they had to be brought together in training sessions to work together, and then the hospital staff, if they were going to go to court, They had to be trained to talk about how they had collected evidence before a jury.

26:30The evidence collected from these new rape kits made its way into courtrooms. What really made the difference was that they were getting a person in a lab coat, whether it was a doctor or nurse, to stand up in front of the jury and say, here's exactly what I did to collect information from the survivor, from this victim. Here's the swabs. Here's the photographs of her injuries. Here's what I documented. And instead of having the victim herself speaking up, you see a person in a lab coat who has scientifically collected evidence. It was a system for collecting scientific evidence and making sure that evidence was good, but it was also a piece of theater because in front of the jury, you have a person in a lab coat.

27:34That person in the white coat can tell the story of this woman who's assaulted. and be believed. It's a theater of belief, whereas juries might be very, very hostile to, especially if a woman's making an accusation against a more powerful man, she would not be believed. And so if you take that all and you put that in a white coat and you have a kit, it really takes the burden of belief off of the survivor herself. And unfortunately, it was a workaround for a very broken social fabric of belief. In 1979, a 28-year-old man was sentenced to 60 years in prison after abducting and raping a bus driver in Chicago.

28:32Marty Goddard's kit had been instrumental in securing the conviction. Marty Goddard said that in the early 1970s, the media would hardly ever write about sexual assault. But that gradually started changing. The media now starts catching up. And gee, it isn't so taboo. You can actually write about this stuff. And you had to educate them. They didn't know anything. They didn't even know what the legal definition in their state was for rape. She says that one day she picked up a copy of the Chicago Tribune. There was this big article in it that said, last night a blonde-haired, 23-, 25-year-old waitress at the blank who lived on the block, 2300 block of blank, got raped.